Preheating in the standard model with the Higgs inflaton coupled to gravity

By J. García-Bellido, Daniel G. Figueroa, J. Rubio. 2008

363 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the details of preheating in an inflationary scenario in which the standard model Higgs, strongly nonminimally coupled to gravity, plays the role of the inflaton. We find that the Universe does not reheat immediately through perturbative decays, but rather initiates a complex process in which perturbative and nonperturbative effects are mixed. The Higgs condensate starts oscillating around the minimum of its potential, producing W and Z gauge bosons nonperturbatively, due to violation of the so-called adiabaticity condition. However, during each semioscillation, the created gauge bosons partially decay (perturbatively) into fermions. The decay of the gauge bosons prevents the development of parametric resonance, since bosons cannot accumulate significantly at the beginning. However, the energy transferred to the decay products of the bosons is not enough to reheat the Universe, so after about a hundred oscillations, the resonance effects will eventually dominate over the perturbative decays. Around the same time (or slightly earlier), backreaction from the gauge bosons into the Higgs condensate will also start to be significant. Soon afterwards, the Universe is filled with the remnant condensate of the Higgs and a nonthermal distribution of fermions and bosons (those of the standard model), which redshift as radiation and matter,more » respectively. We compute the distribution of the energy budget among all the species present at the time of backreaction. From there until thermalization, the evolution of the system is highly nonlinear and nonperturbative, and will require a careful study via numerical simulations.« less

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a197df962d1fd0dce3771238e11be734b5ee158

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Citations in the corpus

A facility to search for hidden particles at the CERN SPS: the SHiP physics case (2015, neutral): “After the slow-roll the Higgs field starts to oscillate and produce particles of the SM, heating the Universe up to the temperatures ∼ 10(14) GeV [776, 777].”
The Phenomenology of Right Handed Neutrinos (2013, neutral): “Various aspects of this model have been studied in the past by different authors [119, 132, 133, 147, 148, 151, 203, 250, 253, 266, 422, 424, 468, 497, 498, 524, 540, 544, 552, 553, 555, 571, 572, 574–588], see [203, 251, 589] for a detailed introduction and review.”
Higgs inflation: consistency and generalisations (2010, methodology): “• MP /ξ φ̄ MP / √ ξ, the intermediate region (relevant for reheating, see [11, 12]).”
Dark Matter, Baryogenesis and Neutrino Oscillations from Right Handed Neutrinos (2012, background): “Moreover, it was suggested that cosmic inflation [31–33] and the current accelerated expansion [34–37] may also be accommodated in this framework by modifications in the gravitational sector, which we will not discuss here4.”
Running inflation in the Standard Model (2008, background): “As Ne has only a weak dependence on ρreh, the details of reheating are rather inconsequential to our mass bounds, but may be calculable [27].”
Gauge-preheating and the end of axion inflation (2015, background): “Furthermore, couplings of scalar fields to Abelian [57–59] or non-Abelian gauge fields in cosmological settings have been studied in recent years [60–75].”